Periodically backup docker containers appdata to an unassigned drive

[mjeshurun]

Hi friends,

To better secure my unraid home server's data, I would like to configure unraid 6.11.5 to periodically backup a few of my docker containers appdata files to an internal m.2 SSD drive.

Is it possible to add the SSD to unraid as an unassigned device and in a format that will be readable by MacOS and Windows (in case I need to restore/open the drive directly with MacOS or windows, and not with unraid)?

Which format should I use: FAT32, exFAT or maybe another type?

Can someone, please, explain the procedure to backup data files to an unassigned device?

Thank you very much 🙏

[trurl]

CA Backup plugin will let you specify a path to an Unassigned Device. And Unassigned Devices plugin can create and mount filesystems that can be read on MacOS or Windows.

[mjeshurun]

4 minutes ago, trurl said:

CA Backup plugin will let you specify a path to an Unassigned Device. And Unassigned Devices plugin can create and mount filesystems that can be read on MacOS or Windows.

Thank you very much @trurl 🙏
Do you know if it's also possible to set UnRAID's MacOS time-machine backups to an unassigned device?

[trurl]

Don't have any experience with that. Is it a docker or plugin?

[mjeshurun]

It's a built-in UnRAID OS feature.
You need to enable Enhanced macOS interoperability under Settings->SMB Settings.

I then continued to setup time-machine backups based on Spaceinvader-One's tutorial.

 

[trurl]

How do you tell it where to backup?

[mjeshurun]

On 12/23/2022 at 12:15 AM, trurl said:

How do you tell it where to backup?

Sorry for the delayed reply. I forgot how I set time-machine up. I will need to rewatch the spaceinvader-one tutorial video.

 

On 12/22/2022 at 11:29 PM, trurl said:

CA Backup plugin will let you specify a path to an Unassigned Device. And Unassigned Devices plugin can create and mount filesystems that can be read on MacOS or Windows.

 

Do you know how I can find the full path location of the unassigned drive?

[trurl]

Mounted Unassigned Devices are in /mnt/disks

[mjeshurun]

21 hours ago, trurl said:

Mounted Unassigned Devices are in /mnt/disks

Thank you.
I managed to set up the Nextcloud backup path to the unassigned drive

 

However, I'm having difficulties setting up the macos time-machine backup.

The first step to create a time-machine backup is to create a new UnRAID share and choose the included/excluded disks the share data will be saved on.

The problem I'm facing is that the Included Disks option does not show unassigned devices. It only lists array drives.

Is it possible to configure UnRAID to show unassigned devices as available disks under Included Disks?

 

[itimpi]

13 minutes ago, mjeshurun said:

Is it possible to configure UnRAID to show unassigned devices as available disks under Included Disks?

No.   That feature is only available for User Shares and UD devices cannot participate in User Shares (one of the differences to using a pool).

[mjeshurun]

On 12/25/2022 at 4:15 PM, itimpi said:

No.   That feature is only available for User Shares and UD devices cannot participate in User Shares (one of the differences to using a pool).

Thanks. I ended up using the TimeMachine docker app.

Unlike the unraid built-in timemachine solution, the docker app allows to choose a path on an unassigned device.

So I'm good

[mjeshurun]

Happy New Year 🎉

Can someone please explain how I can use User Scripts to automatically backup several different data folders on my UnRAID server to an unattended device?

I would like the script to run automatically every X days and keep the last Y backups (earlier backups than Y can be deleted or overwritten).

Is this possible?

Thanks again for your help 🙏

[trurl]

See the example scripts in the Unassigned Devices thread.